


A routine for everything

by Lilliburlero



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe, Capital Punishment, Consent Issues, Corporal Punishment, Crossover, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 13:11:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2582567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Royal Navy has a routine for <i>everything</i>. But sometimes a little discretion doesn't go amiss.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: non-explicit reference to underage sex, consent issues (canonical), homophobia, reference to corporal and capital punishment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A routine for everything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> This is the result of a [prompt meme](http://lilliburlero.dreamwidth.org/59120.html) and some earlier [discussion](http://lilliburlero.tumblr.com/post/85232954991/renault-regency-ish-aus) about Mary Renault characters in Regency AUs. I have nothing like the historical and nautical knowledge required to write convincing Age of Sail fic, so this story is probably best regarded (if you're feeling charitable) as a sketch outlining and exploring possible points of overlap between the two canons. I hope in that character it may be of interest to several readers.
> 
> Its setting, as suggested by the prompt meme, really is an AU, uncanonical, wholly fictional ship and all, though if you're anxious for a point of orientation, I had in mind an AU version of the unnarrated years, (roughly) 1806-9, between _HMS Surprise_ and _The Mauritius Command_.
> 
> The title is taken from Nicholas Monsarrat's novel _The Cruel Sea_ (it's also faintly chilling in context).

The boy—the youngster—the volunteer—whatever he was—appeared in the cockpit, gibbering and shaking, between seven and eight bells of the afternoon watch. Stephen Maturin, about to invade the uropygial gland of the specimen he was dissecting, looked up with a pale, intimidating glare. 

‘What is it? Are you feverish?’

The child bleated inarticulately. Stephen wiped his hands, stepped around the chests upon which the bird was spread, and took him by the elbow.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I—he’s,’ he choked, ‘going—to k—kill m—me—’

‘Your murderer could not remain long undetected on a vessel one hundred and thirty foot long. It should give him pause at least.’

‘The w—way he looked at me, sir—’ He tottered forward. Stephen pushed him upright. 

‘Sit on that chest—not _that_ one, for all love—you will pulverise my hoopoe.’ 

He fetched a container of hartshorn. When the boy had inhaled and revived a little, Stephen solicited a narrative from him, and very much wished he hadn’t, for it was a sordid and criminal one.

He pressed the tips of his index fingers into the inner corners of his eyes, steepling the others. ‘You hear the Articles of War read every Sunday. You must have known—’

‘I didn’t understand—the word, sir. I knew if I asked one of the others I’d be made game of. I looked it up in a lexicon. It said it meant—with beasts.’

‘ _Jesu_. But to my recollection the article in question reads _man or beast.’_

_‘_ Yes, sir. But I—thought that meant—a man _as well as_ the beast. And there wasn’t a beast, sir, I swear.’

Stephen groaned. 

‘I’ll be hanged, sir, shan’t I?’ The boy hiccuped and retched dryly, then began to wail, a sound so low, despairing and archaic that it seemed impossible a fifteen-year-old throat could produce it.

Stephen put an arm around his shoulders and patted awkwardly. ‘No—no, Hazell, you shan’t be hanged. No-one shall be hanged. Not if I can help it.’ 

*

‘—so I administered as powerful a soporific as I thought his constitution would bear. Padeen is watching him, with instructions to inform me if he stirs. Even if he babbles, poor Padeen can’t communicate it.’

Jack’s florid face sagged with dismay.  ‘Do you believe him?’

‘I fear I do.’

‘He’s a plausible little brute, Stephen. Incorrigible landsman, but there’d be a situation for him at Drury Lane.’

‘I should be sceptical had he implicated any _other_ gentleman aboard.’

Jack’s brows drew together, and he shook his head. ‘Surely not. How can you know—’

Long familiar with his friend’s obliviousness to amorous energy discharged by members of his own sex, Stephen found that he could still be startled by its profundity.  The eldest of the young gentlemen belonging to the twenty-eight gun sixth-rate _Abona_ , a person of nineteen years, fastidious habits and nonpareil seamanship, fairly vibrated an erotic potentiality which Stephen conjectured was as intangible to women as it was to his captain.

‘The practice of natural philosophy trains the faculty of observation,’ he remarked levelly. In fact, the young man’s presence—he was something of an amateur geologue, and Stephen had lent him Walker’s _Institutes of Natural History_ —recalled him very vividly to one or two febrile and sentimental friendships he’d had when he was himself about that age: he found it unsettling. 

‘He was to go for his lieutenant’s examination when we put into Gibraltar. By God, I had never been so confident of any candidate. And now I must write to beg a court martial instead.’ Jack rubbed his chin and shut his eyes.

‘I could wish I had said nothing, but—’

‘No, had you not dealt with that infernal swab of a boy so smartly every man aboard would know of it by now. And in any case, it’s not—well, there’s a bit of beastly commerce in most midshipmen's berths at some time or another. We can’t wink at it as they do in the public schools, or as I’m told they do, but we wouldn’t string a boy up for frigging himself in company. But this sort of ill-usage of a junior casts doubt on his fitness for command.’

‘But not, sure to God, for life itself.’

‘There’s only one sentence the court is likely to pass, if he’s found guilty.  Confound him for a fool—’ Jack pounded his great fist into his palm, the displacement of air causing the topmost of a stack of documents to flutter to the boards.

‘Hazell represented to me that it was an attachment of some—affection.’

Jack grunted impatiently. ‘Damned queer way of showing affection, shrieking buggery all over the ship and getting a gentleman hanged.' 

'They quarrelled. Over a beating.'

'Hm. Well, strictly speaking he's not supposed to whack 'em himself, you know. But he's _ipso facto_ our schoolmaster, and it is the agreed method of drubbing in a little navigational mathematics. I can't see much harm in it, for all my own schooling was more cordial and seemed to answer tolerably well. There aren't enough Queenies to go round the fleet.'

Letting this pass, Stephen contented himself with a parenthetical _de facto_.

'I knew well enough the boy was addle-pated. I shouldn’t have agreed—’ 

‘He’s the son of one of General Aubrey’s tenants, is that it?’

‘Mmm. So says the law. Mrs Hazell is rather comely. And _very_ flighty.’

‘Oh, Jack, my dear. I had no notion.’ 

‘Well, I don’t know for certain myself: he favours his mother most strikingly, which I would have said an hour ago was well for him. But it makes a touchy business all the touchier. Still, I suppose we must hear what the other fellow has to say for himself.’ He got up with the contained grace of a quarter-century spent in close confines and called a servant. ‘Carter—Carter! Pass word for Mr Lanyon.’ 

Ducking back into the cabin, he said, ‘Oh, Stephen, in all truth I’m sickened—all appetite gone. I can’t say I find Lanyon agreeable, exactly, but he shows exceptional promise—never quite seen the like—and to see him in irons for what I cannot but feel is not much more than a piccalilli, you know—’

‘ _Peccadillo_ , brother,’ Stephen murmured. ‘But must he suffer so?’

‘What do you say?’

‘I hesitate to raise it, but might not the solution lie in your own history?’ 

Seeing Jack’s face turn thunderous, he added quickly, ‘For all that the sex of the young person concerned was otherwise?’

‘Oh—I see. Good God, Stephen. That might answer, might it not? Humble him a little—yes. Capital.’ Jack laughed, a hollower sound than his usual rich peal.

‘It lies within your power?’

‘Ye—es. Their Lordships dislike it, these days, as they dislike anything that smacks of independence. But the exercise of discretion is not wholly forbidden us yet.’ 

‘And Hazell?’

‘Must be put off at Gibraltar, owing to the exigencies of the Service, I think, and his passage to England arranged from there.  It is a sad pother.’ He shook his head and wrung his hands. ‘It will waste _time_ , and there is nothing I detest more in this earth than that.’

*

Entering the cabin, Lanyon touched as if for reassurance his spotless stock before pressing his arms rigidly to his sides. His fingernails were cracked and blackened; he’d had time for a clean neckcloth, but not for the sustained scrubbing necessary to remove impacted grime with seawater. Despite the dirt, his hands were beautiful; Stephen felt the impulse to move his own scarred, mauled members out of sight, and resisted it, he feared noticeably. A thrill he thought ten years or more dead ran him through. Lanyon’s looks were of a very moderate sort: that fine, fair hair could not support the fashionable, tousled crop _à la Brute_ to which it aspired, his narrow, angular face was almost crushed by the weighty structure of the brow above it; the mouth, accustomed to both the forbearance and the execution of arbitrary naval discipline, formed a bleak, inexpressive line. But nonetheless, set against Lanyon’s spare, trim frame, Jack's big, braw wholesomeness looked impossibly pouchy and run to seed. 

Jack conducted interrogations in accordance with that maxim of Nelson’s that he cherished and implemented mercifully rarely in belligerent action: _never mind manoeuvres, always go at ‘em._ Lanyon, were such a thing possible, was still more artless.

‘The other boys made his life devilish hard. I tried to protect him from the worst of it. But as for anything else, it’s slander, sir.’

‘Dr Maturin is of the opinion he is telling the truth. And—’ Jack paused, a musicianly bar’s rest, just long enough to produce a callow counterfeit of piqued honour. Stephen saw he had underestimated his friend’s guile. ‘I agree with him.’

Lanyon’s expression did not alter, nor did his posture perceptibly slacken.  But all was changed; his every effort was now concentrated in averting physical collapse, no mental resource left. Stephen knew the condition in excruciating detail; he had experienced it, and had more than once contrived to produce it in others. Now he felt a fierce protectiveness not distinct from desire: he would at that moment have taken Lanyon’s place, or taken him in his arms with equal alacrity. To aggravate the pain came the unbidden thought of Diana Villiers—but no, her pride and courage proceeded from self-delight and love of life, and Lanyon’s from their opposites.

Jack was saying, ‘—this has not always been a happy ship, and I don’t propose to humiliate its people further with a court martial of the most degrading kind. I’m disrating you, Lanyon, turning you before the mast. Have you anything to say?’

‘No, sir.’ 

Tears stood on Lanyon’s lower eyelids; he blinked hard. When he opened his eyes again the startling light blue had a rosaceous border, but his gaze was steady and composed. For an interminable half-minute he regarded Stephen with fathomless hatred and contempt. His look flickered fractionally rightwards to take in Jack too, making a connexion that Stephen must allow was as reasonable as it was erroneous, before the glassy, imbecilic stare of the rebuked sailor supervened. No surer way, Stephen reflected, to earn a man’s implacable enmity than to save his life, unless it were also to give him cause to think you did it in the service of self-preservation. 

**Author's Note:**

> Ahistorical and uncanonical as this is, I did do some very basic research. Until 1815, it was possible, as far as I can make out, for a captain to disrate a midshipman entirely upon his own discretion, as appears to have been the case with Jack's own turning before the mast.
> 
> If Hazell's misunderstanding of the words of the relevant Article of War seems implausible, I can only plead that it was my own (aged 11, rather than 15, but we are perhaps contending with Hazell's Dostoyevsky act here.)


End file.
